One or more aspects of the present invention relate in general to data processing systems, and in particular, to managing a virtual computer resource on at least one virtual machine.
In today's information technology infrastructure, many server systems support logical partitioning. Many logical partitions of a logically partitioned system execute operating systems on which applications are deployed. Such applications communicate with applications within the same partition, within the same logically partitioned system, with devices coupled to the logically partitioned system, and with other applications on other systems coupled to the logically partitioned system. The communication protocols required to support such communication must support connection oriented, in-order, reliable, and flow-controlled data delivery. Implementing protocols to meet these requirements leads to resource intensive implementation which requires increased performance. Delivering such performance requires sophisticated and expensive communication hardware. The requirements still remain in place even in virtualized server environments. Another challenge is to secure the communication protocols against surveying attacks of the communication lines or ensuring the availability of the counterpart of the communication.
US 2011/0093870 A1, hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, describes a method in a data processing system for communicating between a plurality of applications. A request is received from an originating application to send data to a destination application. Further a request is sent to identify a location of the destination application to a virtualization management mechanism. It is determined whether the location of the destination application is a second logical partition in the plurality of logical partitions of the logically partitioned data processing system in response to receiving a response from the virtualization management mechanism. A bypass protocol is used to send the request from the originating application to the destination application in response to the location being the second logical partition.
A mechanism is provided for a high performance and resource efficient communication among a plurality of applications running on logical partitions of a logically partitioned system. The performance of the communication is increased by providing a high through-put with a low latency. By increasing the throughput and decreasing latency, the logically partitioned system reduces the processing requirements of the logically partitioned system's components such as processing units, memory, input/output bandwidth, or the like. The mechanism comprises a bypass transport protocol for communicating between logical partitions. Communication software within each operation system executing on the logical partition determines when the bypass transport protocol is to be deployed. Therefore, application programming interfaces (API) are maintained thus supporting existing applications without change and supporting connection oriented, reliable, in-order, and flow-controlled data transfers.
US 2011/0185062 A1, hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, describes a qualitative resource assignment wizard which receives qualitative information for a logical partition (LPAR) and calculates computer resource assignments for the LPAR based on the qualitative information and a set of conversion functions. For example, the qualitative resource assignment wizard may calculate a processing unit assignment, a memory assignment, and an I/O slot assignment for the LPAR. The qualitative information may be input by a user, for example, utilizing a graphical user interface (GUI). Conversion functions are calculated during a training phase, in which a user periodically provides qualitative information while resource usage data is gathered. The wizard may reside in a hardware management console (HMC) or other administrative console and/or may be a component of a hypervisor or other partition management code. Software code associated with the wizard may be provided by a network server application to a client system for enabling a user to remotely input the qualitative information.